Theses of a Report Made at the St. Petersburg City Conference of July 8 on the Attitude of the Social-Democratic Labour Party to the Third Duma[1]

Written: Written in July 1907
Published:
Published as a leaflet in July 1907.
Published according to the leaflet text.
Source:Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1972,
Moscow,
Volume 13,
pages 58-59.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
(2004).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
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1. The boycott of the Duma, as the experience of the
Russian revolution has shown, is the only correct decision on the part of the
revolutionary Social-Democrats under such historical conditions as make it a
really active boycott, i. e., one that represents the force of a broad and
universal revolutionary upswing moving directly towards a straightforward assault
on the old regime (consequently, towards an armed uprising). The boycott fulfils
a great historical task when it serves as a warning by the proletariat to the
whole people against blind petty-bourgeois infatuation with constitutional
illusions and with the first quasi-constitutional institutions granted by the
old regime.

2. To regard the boycott as an effective means in itself, apart from a sweeping,
universal, powerful, and rapid up swing of the revolution and a direct
assault of the whole people aimed at overthrowing the old regime, apart from
the aims of the struggle against popular enthusiasm for the granted
constitution, is to act under the influence of feeling rather than of reason.

3. Therefore, to proclaim a boycott of the Duma on the grounds that the
electoral law favourable to the Cadets has been superceded by one favourable
to the Octobrists, on the grounds that a frankly Octobrist Duma is taking the
place of the Second Duma, which spoke in a Cadet way and acted in an
Octobrist way and in which the Social-Democrats took part not without
benefit to the cause of the revolution—to proclaim a boycott on such
grounds would mean not only substituting revolutionary excitability for
steady revolutionary work, but revealing that the Social-Democrats themselves
are a victim of the worst illusions in regard to the Cadet Duma and the Cadet
constitution.

4. The focal point of all the propaganda of the revolutionary Social-Democrats
should be to explain to the people that the coup d’éat of June 3,1907
was a direct and absolutely inevitable result of the defeat of the December
uprising of 1905. The lesson of the second period of the Russian revolution,
that of 1906 and 1907, is that the same systematic offensive of reaction and
retreat of the revolution that took place throughout that period, is
inevitable so long as a belief in the constitution prevails, so long as
quasi-constitutional methods of struggle prevail, so long as the proletariat
has not mustered its strength and recovered from the defeats inflicted on it
in order to rise in in comparably broader masses for a more decisive and
aggressive revolutionary assault aimed at the overthrow of the tsarist
regime.

5. The strike movement that is now flaring up in the Moscow industrial area and
is beginning to spread to other regions of Russia should be regarded as the
most important guarantee of a possible revolutionary upswing in the near
future. Therefore, the Social-Democrats should do their utmost not only to
support and develop the economic struggle of the proletariat, but to convert
this movement, which so far is only a trade-union movement, into a broad
revolutionary upswing and direct struggle of the working-class masses
against the armed force of tsarism. Only when the efforts of the
Social-Democrats in this. direction have been crowned with success, only on
the, basis of an aggressive revolutionary movement that has already
come. into existence, can the boycott slogan acquire serious importance in
its inseparable connection with a direct appeal to the masses for an armed
uprising, for the overthrow of .the tsarist regime, and the replacement of
the latter by a provisional revolutionary government, for the convocation of
a constituent assembly on the basis of universal, direct, and equal suffrage
by secret ballot.

Notes

[1]The St. Petersburg City Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. was held
in Terijoki (Finland) on July 8 and 14 (21 and 27), 1907. The records of
this Conference have been lost. Sixty-one delegates with the right to vote
and 21 consultative delegates attended the first session.

Lenin made a report to the Conference on the attitude towards the
elections to the Third Duma. The Conference approved Lenin’s line
against boycott of the Third Duma, which he upheld in his theses and
reports.